It was quite a clear emotional plea from everybody, forcing them to realise that it was not an invisible problem … The short-term results were within a month or two they both seemed clean and in a good frame of mind. It was pretty much ‘please, don’t do this to yourselves, this is not good for you’. “There were seven or eight of us that confronted them at Cedars Sinai hospital. The next day he set about organising an intervention involving label associates, doctors and drug counsellors in LA to press both Love and Cobain to undergo detox, particularly since Love had just learnt she was pregnant. He’d heard reports, but Goldberg first noticed Cobain withdrawn and barely able to stay conscious after an appearance on Saturday Night Live in January 1992. Although Goldberg is careful not to blame Love for Cobain’s drug-taking, what begins as bonding over cough syrup turns into a revival of his previous dabblings in heroin. There are moments of intense, insular romance, disruptive tiffs and drug buddyism. After several years of flirting from afar, Love’s pursuit of Cobain becomes a full-blown relationship late in 1991. Goldberg’s book is sympathetic towards the splashdown of Love in Cobain’s upended world (“he fell in love… this wasn’t a transient rock’n’roll fling but a deep connection”), but recognises that the sudden presence of a “strong-minded, enormously talented artist in her own right and an enormously complicated person” in the Nirvana camp at such a pivotal time shifted the dynamic. It’s believed he took his life on 5 April, 25 years ago today. His body was discovered there on 8 April by an electrician arriving at the Lake Washington Boulevard house to install a security system, lying beside a shotgun he’d bought from his friend Dylan Carlson before leaving for LA. Neither he nor Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson – whom Love had asked to check the house for Cobain – thought to look for him in the greenhouse above the garage. Then, the day after checking in, he jumped over the perimeter fence, flew back to Seattle and went missing – despite several sightings, a concerned Love hired a private detective to track him down, focusing on staking out his drug dealer’s apartment. On 30 March, Cobain checked into the Exodus Recovery Centre in LA, where he discussed his personal and drug problems with counsellors, seemed positive to visiting friends and spent time with his daughter Frances Bean for the last time in his life. In fact, the intervention did have the desired effect, albeit briefly. Of course I never was able to have such conversations.” I was just hoping that if the drugs got out of his system then he could think more clearly and that would be a good time to have better conversations with him. I couldn’t shake him out of being depressed, I couldn’t cheer him up or get him to feel there was hope. “I spoke to him on the phone when I got home and talked to him one last time. When Goldberg – who had been one of Nirvana’s managers throughout their peak years and was now a trusted confidante and adviser – told him to quit heroin for good, Cobain complained about feeling trapped by the constant attention of being one of the most famous rockstars in the world, and argued that, if William Burroughs could live a long and creative life as a junkie, why couldn’t he? At one point he fled to an upstairs bathroom when management associate Janet Billig began flushing his prescription drugs, fearing a second overdose. He insisted he needed a therapist rather than rehab, and began flicking through the Yellow Pages to find one. Glassy-eyed, increasingly angry and feeling – in Love’s words – “ganged up on”, Cobain wouldn’t crack. As each of the friends, industry associates, counsellors and bandmates present – Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic was there, alongside live guitarist Pat Smear – urged Cobain to get clean, get help and get on with living his charmed-yet-cursed life, they knew they were running out of chances. The previous week police had been called to the Seattle house, where Cobain had locked himself in a room with several guns and a bottle of pills. Three weeks earlier, he had overdosed on champagne and Rohypnol in Rome, which Love would claim to be his first suicide attempt. They had all been invited by Cobain’s wife Courtney Love as part of an intervention over Cobain’s spiralling depression and drug abuse, but each would have known how high the stakes were. On 25 March 1994, Nirvana’s former manager Danny Goldberg joined nine other people at 171 Lake Washington Boulevard in Seattle to beg for Kurt Cobain’s life.
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